I'm not sure what to call the effect I'm trying to get - "split screen" or "video wall" or something else.

And I have gotten it working, but my approach seems very clunky and hard to repeat. I did it in a video I created for my mother-in-law, and I'm adding it to my very-slowly-coming-to-life Philmont video.

Basically, for the Philmont one, I have lots of photos of each of us climbing spar poles, so the interesting area is tall and skinny. I'd like to show three or four, side-by-side, on the screen, and then swap photos into each of those, staggered.

This means I need to be able to cleanly crop each photo to the interesting part, keeping it tall and skinny, and then position it on the screen in its 1/3 or 1/4 location. And I'd like to be able to pan on the photo.

Ok, I've tried two approaches, and each is slow, and neither one lets me pan the photo *in place* after I position it.

First, I used only the Pan/Crop tool, using both the mask and the position portions. This works, but tweaking the mask is slow and annoying when I try to move it or change it - I invariably wound up doing the opposite of what I want.

Second, I've tried using only the position part of the Pan tool to "crop" the photo and then used track motion to locate it. Getting these two to work together and look nice and consistent hasn't been easy.

And with either approach, I can't then keep, for example the left photo in place buy pan on it to add motion.

I know people do this. I saw the "Dallas intro" thread on here, and was amazed. I'd greatly appreciate any advice!

Thanks!